Transforming your home on a 20,000 rupee idea

Shivani Dogra shows pictures of her flat. To put it mildly, they resemble a pigsty. The bathroom looks like it belongs to a prison. Window sills clearly serve as trash cans, as tightly compressed pieces of paper and junk are placed against windows.

It’s tough to distinguish the living room from the bedroom: Mountains of clothes, suitcases and junk block the view of the room.

Dogra shows pictures of her flat again. This time, they look like out an Ikea catalogue. Or at least how Ikea would look like, if it decided to go kitsch.

The ‘mix and match’ concept is at its best: Red walls, dark green cupboards, lime green ceilings, floor mats used as window screens, window chicks, movie posters, beaded chains on lampshades.

It’s a haven. And so, Dogra begins to speak of a flat makeover that took her six months and around Rs 20,000 to complete. With the prices being what they are it was an incredible feat  of
money management.

When she shifted to Delhi from Mumbai five years ago, Dogra moved in with her grandmother. “Later, my grandmother sold her house and I needed to find a place quickly. Up to that point I wasn’t aware of rent rates in the city or what they looked like,” remembers Dogra.

Finding a house (let alone a likeable one) was an exhausting affair. “Some were down right hovels, others just felt unsafe and just when I was exhausted with the Delhi summer, brokers, bad rooms — BAM! An aunt of mine who stayed down the street from my grandmother told me about this place.”

 “To say that I fell in love instantly with the space would be a gross lie,” she continues. The flat had one rickety bed with a waif like mattress, a brown cupboard and one beautifully carved Kashmiri table in terms of decor, says Dogra. “The walls were dirty and the bathroom was just the sorriest excuse for a bathroom.”

Her then-job as an editorial assistant with the US-based National Public Radio took her all around the country and “into the drawing rooms of all sorts of people from architects to academicians to policy experts to media personalities to farmers”. “I just observed the decor, style and ways of living … I didn’t open a single magazine for inspiration,” she explains.

The transformation took place in phases. “I let it grow organically. When I saw something I liked, I just bought it if it was within budget. I just matched colours.”

Though she hired painters to paint the place up, she painted the doors and cupboards herself. “By and large I shopped in Kasauli, Amritsar, Chandini Chowk, Sarojini Nagar, Okhala, Kabadi markets and Lajpat Nagar in Delhi and even moving sales. I used the cheapest stuff I could lay my hands on.”

Dogra’s favourite part of the flat is the bedroom. “I love eating dinner in my little passage with music playing and looking in at my softly lit bedroom.” And once her friends were invited over, they were gob smacked. “Most were just shocked that I had a creative side to me,” she laughs.